Seminar series
Date
Mon, 05 Mar 2018
15:45
15:45
Location
L6
Speaker
Chris Leininger
Organisation
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A particle bouncing around inside a Euclidean polygon gives rise to a biinfinite "bounce sequence" (or "cutting sequence") recording the (labeled) sides encountered by the particle. In this talk, I will describe recent work with Duchin, Erlandsson, and Sadanand, where we prove that the set of all bounce sequences---the "bounce spectrum"---essentially determines the shape of the polygon. This is consequence of a technical result about Liouville currents associated to nonpositively curved Euclidean cone metrics on surfaces. In the talk I will explain the objects mentioned above, how they relate to each other, and give some idea of how one determines the shape of the polygon from its bounce spectrum.